The race is on to get people back to the moon. It's a new day in space exploration. A giant leap forward for all of humanity. Liftoff. We have liftoff. With China and America both vying for first place. The United States has returned to the moon. China's lunar probe has returned to Earth. They've both recently sent landers to the moon's surface and say they'll have astronauts there by 2030. We're in a space race. But no one has set foot on the moon for decades. So why the sudden interest in going back? The discovery of water on the moon is really important. And what's at stake for the winner? The idea is, can we actually stay and live on the moon and work on the moon long term? That's one small step for man. When Neil Armstrong made his historic moonwalk in 1969. It marked a crucial step in the space race with the USSR.

The moon landing in 1969 was the culmination of a decade-long project initiated, of course, by President Kennedy. I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth. It really galvanized the American space program at the time. Of course, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon and walked on the moon. The Soviets never got there. Only 12 people have ever set foot on the moon since then. They were all white American men, and the last visit was in 1972. But that is about to change. There are now over 100 missions planned before 2030. To the moon. To the moon, to the moon, to the moon. Back when America landed humans on the moon for the first time, we were really the only ones that could do it apart from the Soviet Union, who also was trying.

A lot of the world is catching up technologically, and so they are also trying to see if they can become one of the elite clubs to land people or even robots on the moon. As costs of going to space have gone down, and some countries have become more ambitious. Everybody's saying, hey, the moon, we should be going there. This map shows the landings there so far from nations including Israel, Russia, the UAE, India, and Japan, as well as America and China. And while there may not be any European flags yet, the European Space Agency also plans to send a lunar lander soon. But it’s China and America who are leading the lunar charge. Just as in the 1960s, there was a space race between the United States and the Soviet Union, as part of the Cold War. Today, there does seem to be a new competition between the United States and its major global adversary,

global rival, China. China is often invoked a lot of the times as a proxy for what the Soviet Union was during the space race in the 60s and 70s, just because that turned out to work very well. You know, it was a strong motivator. There is definitely concern among lawmakers about America's dominance in this space era. Maybe if the Chinese didn't have a program that was aiming for having Chinese astronauts on the moon by the end of the decade, maybe the Americans wouldn't feel the need to move quite so quickly. This blockbuster style promo is for the US's Artemis two mission to the moon for all humanity. America plans to send four astronauts into lunar orbit, including the first woman and first person of color, as part of the Artemis program. This will set the stage for the next Artemis mission to have people on the moon in the next few years. But while Neil Armstrong only spent a few hours

on the moon, the Artemis astronauts will be there for much longer, spending at least six days on the lunar surface. China also hopes to have people on the moon by 2030. And has achieved a series of impressive firsts. It was the first and so far, only nation to land on the far side of the moon, and the first to send samples from there back to Earth. Going to the far side of the moon is especially hard, of course. It never actually faces Earth and so communicating with anything on the far side of the moon is really, really hard. All this has America worried. I don't want China to get to the South Pole first with humans and then say, this is ours, stay out. Bill Nelson, the NASA administrator, has frequently referred to China's policies here on Earth, in particular the South China Sea, where China has said all of these islands in the South China Sea, they belong to us.

Bill Nelson has said in the same way that they did this grab in the South China Sea, there is potential that they would try to do something on the moon. And so we have to make sure to stop that. A spokesperson for the Chinese embassy in Washington rejected the remarks and said in a statement, China always advocates the peaceful use of outer space. Whoever makes it to the moon first will be heading here, the lunar south pole. And that choice of location is important because it tells you what some of the recent fuss around the moon is all about, Water. So one thing that a lot of engineers like to point to is that water could be mined from the moon and then split apart into its components, hydrogen and oxygen, which for those that don't know, are the big components of rocket propellant. So potentially, you could take that water that you find on the moon, split it apart, you know, resynthesize it into rocket propellant,

and then you could use that propellant to fuel rockets that take off from the moon and go even farther than the moon's distance. Water was only confirmed on the moon in 2018, and it's thought to be most plentiful in the dark craters at the South Pole, some of which never see light. This water could potentially help support a more permanent moon base. The big question is, you know, we just don't know how much water there is, in the form of ice. We don't know how difficult it would be to access it. How costly would it be to utilize this? There are also other valuable assets on the moon that could be useful in the distant future, including rare earth metals like lithium and the isotope helium-3, which could be used to generate energy via nuclear fusion. While using helium from the moon to power life on Earth may be a very long way off, a more pressing question

is how any of the moon's resources, including water, would be divided up once humans do get back there. Technically, no country can lay claim to the moon. This was set out in the Outer Space Treaty back in 1967, which declared the moon was for the greater good of mankind. This treaty means that the moon and our sister planet will serve only the purposes of peace. But when you start looking at who can claim the resources on the moon, it gets more complicated. One of the major concerns among legal experts right now is that there is a mismatch between where we're going, where the technology is moving, and where the law is. So the concern is that back in the 1960s, 1970s, when people were writing these treaties, nobody thought about the possibility that they're going to be companies active in space. It was country. The country, countries were the ones that were active in space.

And so, in some ways, the law hasn't kept pace with that. One international agreement that has begun to address the issue of how companies should operate in space is the Artemis Accords, drawn up in 2020, drafted by America and signed by more than 40 international partners to set out rules for working in space. The Artemis Accords affirm the simple contention that we can, in fact, extract and utilize space resources. Countries and companies should be able to enjoy the fruits of their labor. But China has not signed. Instead, it's part of a rival agreement with Russia and a small number of other nations. China is concerned about the Artemis Accords because, in the Artemis Accords, there's a provision called safety zones, and the theory behind the safety zone is that you're doing something on the moon. You want to make sure that everybody else knows you're doing something on the moon, and everybody else knows, Don't come by, don't come to this area on the moon.

because you might interfere with what we're doing. The way that, say, people in China might look at that is, this seems a little bit like a land grab. You're calling it a safety zone. We're calling it claiming territory. So what's next? Well, investment in the race to the moon is moving at pace. But one of the things that's different this time is that while China's efforts are state-led, American space agency NASA is now working in partnership with private companies. So the way that NASA is trying to go back to the moon now is very different than when they did it during the Apollo era. So NASA has tapped a number of private companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin, and many others, to build the hardware that they need to get to the moon. NASA's spending on the Artemis program is a fraction of what it spent on the Apollo missions. As a percentage of GDP, in part as it's relying

on private partners to do the heavy lifting. NASA is working with a much more limited budget, you know, adjusted for inflation than they had during the 60s and 70s. And that's a lot of the reason why they're using these public-private partnerships, any way that they can save money but still get the things that they need. Some people have criticized NASA for relying too much on the private sector, saying that essentially NASA is just pinching pennies and that as a result of just trying to save some money, NASA is increasing the chances of failure. NASA would argue, well, if we want to be able to do this, we have to find the most efficient way to do it. And the most efficient way to do it is to involve more of the private sector. Thanks to this model, a whole host of smaller companies are now designing and manufacturing rovers and robots for moon missions. One of these succeeded in landing a robotic spacecraft on the moon.

in February 2024. We are on this surface, and we are transmitting. And welcome to the moon. Which marked the first time a private company had achieved such a feat. So one beneficiary of the race in America at least, could be not only nations, but private companies and some very wealthy individuals. No matter who actually gets boots on the moon first.

Why There's a New Race to the Moon

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Why There's a New Race to the Moon

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